I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make him popular.

Calling Mr.Forster "Buckshot" Forster did him no harm.

On the contrary, the epithet might have helped him to success had not Mr.
Gladstone given way behind him at the most critical moment of his grapple with the revolutionary organisation in Ireland.

We hear a great deal about resistance to tyrants being obedience to God, but I fear that obedience to God is not the strongest natural passion of the human heart, and I doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it.

Even Tom Paine had the wit to see that it was his "good heart" which brought Louis XVI.